Sen. Cruz Calls on President Obama to answer concerns about the economy in State of the Union address

Will the president admit economic failures, implement policies to increase jobs, growth and opportunity?

January 24, 2014

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WASHINGTON, DC -– U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is calling on President Obama to hold himself and his administration accountable for the failure to initiate economic recovery and answer what he will do to implement policies that will increase jobs, end stifling regulations and fundamentally reform our tax code.

Regarding the economy, Sen. Cruz has asked:“Will the President recognize that his economic policies have failed to create the millions of jobs that he promised and have, instead, reduced the labor force participation rate to its lowest level in decades? Will he commit to commonsense, job-creating policies such as the immediate authorization of the Keystone Pipeline, a moratorium on new regulations, and fundamental tax reform for every American?”

It has been five years since President Obama promised to fix the economy. The President’s economic plan of debt, tax increases, bailouts, so called-stimulus, and government welfare has not produced the good-paying jobs Americans need and deserve.

Job growth in the Obama “recovery” has been significantly slower than the average American post-recession economic recovery. The Joint Economic Committee reports that private sector payroll employment hit its low in February 2010. Since then, payrolls have grown by only 8.2 million jobs, but if job growth under President Obama was on par with the average job recoveries since the 1960s, 12.7 million jobs would have been created. That’s 4.5 million more than we’ve seen under Obama, which means job growth would have been at 11.9 percent instead of the current 7.7 percent.

President Obama’s policies are making it harder for Americans to make ends meet. During his tenure, real median household income is down $2,268. Since the president’s inauguration, the price of gas has gone from $1.84 to $3.28 per gallon. According to Census data, 46.5 million Americans now live in poverty, including 45 percent of children living only with their mother. For the first time since 1965, at least 15 percent of the population has been in poverty for three consecutive years.

Meanwhile, 8.3 percent of Hispanics and 11.9 percent of blacks are unemployed. Among teenagers, more than one in five is unemployed, including 35.5 percent of black teens. Among workers over 25 without a high school diploma, unemployment is 9.8 percent, compared to 3.3 percent for those with at least a Bachelor's degree.

President Obama’s administration has steadfastly pursued an agenda hostile to job creation and economic growth: Obamacare, tax increases, Dodd-Frank, anti-energy production policies, excessive regulation, and an unstable dollar. Each of these drives up costs and complexity, particularly for small businesses, making it harder to hire, take risks, and expand.

Yet, the United States has a wealth of natural resources at its fingertips that, if tapped, would spark hundreds of thousands of well-paying jobs for hard-working Americans. Unleashing our energy sector to create jobs combined with a moratorium on new regulations and fundamental tax reform that revamps our tax code to be flatter, simpler and fairer are the first steps to economic recovery.

Sen. Cruz has asked a series of questions that Americans expect President Obama to answer in his State of the Union address. The remaining questions are as follows and will be highlighted daily leading up to the President’s speech Tuesday:

Will the President call on Congress to form a Joint Select Committee to finally discover the truth of why four Americans perished in a preventable terrorist attack in Benghazi 16 months ago?

Will the President finally recognize that it was a mistake to ram through Obamacare on a party-line vote and that, right now, it is hurting millions of Americans? Will he take real responsibility for misleading the American people when he falsely promised “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan” and “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor”? Will he acknowledge that he doesn’t have the power to unilaterally rewrite the health law for powerful favored interests such as big business and Congress? And will he finally work with Congress to repeal Obamacare and start over, adopting instead reforms that will make healthcare more personal, portable, and affordable?

Will the President allow the Department of Justice to appoint a special prosecutor to fully investigate the IRS’s illegal targeting of conservatives? The President should be eager to prove he has clean hands on this issue. He professed to be angry and outraged by the IRS abuse. Will he pledge to stop new IRS rules that restrict the free speech of non-profit groups?

Will the President act to ensure that the privacy of law-abiding citizens is protected from unjustifiable violations by arms of the federal government such as the NSA, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Internal Revenue Service, and Department of Health and Human Services?